Ripheus23

I guess it can't be "Nightmare-hallows" because that phrase is already in circulation from someone else. So maybe "Nightmare-falderal," that would be a neat little odd word, maybe...

Buried War, the. Or maybe "the Tomb War," who knows, but it's a legendary war being fought for centuries/millennia (depending on the storyteller) deep underground by gigantic underground insect/kindred monsters. The scorpion colossi that are "common knowledge" dwell principally and strongly in mountain areas, but they seem potentially capable of living deep in the earth. But what would they be fighting? Not a gelatinous cube swarm, no (I forgot to mention that I decided that gelatinous cubes, spheres, Platonic solids broadly, maybe even things like tesseracts, would be an ecological feature of the scenario). But... oh, gosh, well, haha, let's say, when the old world was recreated, then a large mass of osseous detritus was assembled at random into a metaphorically deeply-buried skeleton monster. Not an animalistic bulk, not quite, but like a network of bristling skeleton-tentacles in a certain vast underground sector. Something that makes very distinguishable noise when it's about... (Like, if there is somehow, somewhere, underground air flow, enough for effective wind, then the passage of this wind through hollow skull structures might produce a wind-instrument effect of some sort?) And so the underground scorpion colossi armies are constantly fighting with massive skeleton-tentacles in the Buried War's objectively valid referent (the stories of this meta-event are laden with odd magical and false details, that is, like a nonexistent intervening faction composed of just one unique separate monster; this is to be shown at some point to be a distorted application of knowledge that there is surely a surface-dwelling hypermonster from the old world, otherwise fully recomposed in the new one, to the expected underground "situation": these people incorrectly judged that the elder demon was interfering in the Buried War, when, even if "surprisingly," it was not).

(How long has it been going on? Well, how old ought this recreated world be, in terms of its intended sense of historical timing ("providence")? I'm suggesting that it's at this stage only about 7,000 years old, aren't I? Elsewhere, somewhere, in my writing this down... But is the Buried War a holdover from the "olden days"? Because then it could be millions of years going. I guess, if the skeleton-tentacle blob was created by warped recombination then no, though... hmm... Actually, it would be a little bit more worldbuilding-optimizing to talk about at least three major "factions" in the underground war. So, the scorpion colossi... Wait, I think the way I defined them, they're from the recombination warpage too... Argh! So there'd have to be two from before instead, as such. For four total later; but what would they be?)

(Hmm... Maybe like far below even the gem-fracturing stones along the ways of the scorpion colossi and the skeleton demon, there was an enormous lightless cavern, enough for two whole nations to be roughly stacked atop each other inside of it and still have enough room to fight pointlessly over control of the sky. Which there was a lost abyss, after all. But ensconced in a mountainous alcove there, there is a titan city that does have the capacity for physical self-illumination. This city was created unknowably long ago in the first iterate of the world, and continues to send out deadly stone-theurgy "probes" up into other under-realms, towards the high surface. There is some evidence that the fourth major faction was also an especial foe of the coverted city, either directly or by the legends of even those days. But its physical/corporeal presence was not clearly recorded anywhere. Some of the more weirdly, piously rationalistic applicants of their relevant scriptures would conclude, "therefore," that this was strong evidence that the intact elder demon had genuinely been at work in the deep. "We already have it available in the record, it's more 'parsimonious,'" I could see an argument like that...) (It turns out to be a magical distortion in social realities, which is why it was so dangerous to the deep city: because any city in its path would be at risk, but given the background situation (including the bulk of old-world time involved), the threat of the social magic cloud "infecting" a surface city was historically low. It mostly has had access, such as even when it has truly "existed" as a cohesive enough mass at all (a fact which fluctuates over time), to the deep city, and a few other settlements from other beings of some long-forsaken ages. (Maybe it's like, you're trained to associate the weird wind-whistling from the skull horde, WITH that horde, so some POV character "down there" is at first all like "whew, there's no skulls for that wind to be whistling through" and their knowledgeable companions look at them aghast, like, no, it's worse when there's no skulls, because then something else is mimicking the wind-whistling of the skulls, and the thing that is doing the mimicking is from the olden realms, from some other endlessly dark quarter far, far below the mantle?)

(In fact, near enough to the core zone(s), there is a form of mass sentient magma, the living serum of the planet I guess. This can be communicated with somehow, and is communicated with, at some time, for some reason. It's probably a positive event, like the protagonists are helped out by "talking to" the magma-serum. There are also skittish diamond-based creatures called ur-mice, though they don't necessarily look like mice as much as potatoes bristling with flimsy roots. And who knows what else. Suppose, for example, some unknown anomalous recombination that deposited its object in the deep underground. This is reasonable to consider as possibly having happened, so that we would have reason to expect that there is as such one other huge magical-faction/factor in this underground domain.)